If you’ve searched and found this post, it’s probably because you’ve found my Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) which has the UIN / Hex Code 278E7AB5B8FFBFF. Hopefully it’s because I lost it, rather than because I used it in an emergency. The correct procedure if you find a PLB is to report it to the police. All PLBs in Canada should be registered with the Canadian Beacon Registry. Mine is, and they have my contact / emergency info. Thanks.

I currently use two external monitors with my MacBook Air – one connected via the mini displayport, the second via a USB graphics card. When using google hangouts in chrome, on either the laptop screen, or the first external monitor, any chrome windows open on the second external monitor would flicker like crazy. This was especially problematic for a typical layout / work-flow for me: hangout on large screen, relevant doc for the conversation open to the side on the USB monitor.

It turns out there’s an easy fix:

Go to chrome://flags/ and enable “GPU compositing on all pages” then click restart at the bottom of the screen.

I’m posting this because it was relatively hard to find a solution, so I’m hoping this post will include enough of the keywords I tried when looking for a fix to show up for others in searches. You’re welcome.

The results of the 2013 Liberal leadership race were announced on Sunday. The data the Liberal Party have published now include riding-by-riding specific results, but they aren’t in a particularly convenient format, and don’t include the popular vote.

However, the published data does include both the total votes cast in each riding, and the points for each candidate, and that gives us all we need to calculate the popular vote. (The points for each candidate are that candidate’s percentage of the popular vote. Multiply points by the total valid votes cast in each riding and you have the actual number of votes each candidate received.)

That’s what I’ve done here, en mass. I used some automated scripting to pull all the results for each riding from the Liberal page, and tabulate it (clicking on each riding would be a little tedious). I then dropped that all into a google spreadsheet that calculates the popular vote.

The results: Trudeau got 78% of the popular vote, and pro-cooperation candidate Joyce Murray (who was almost unknown going into the race) picked up 12%.

Now, for the details (click on any title to load the source google spreadsheet)…

Canada does not – as yet – export much tar sands oil to Europe. So why, you might ask, have the Canadian and Alberta governments been working overtime using tax dollars to fund a massive misinformation and lobbying campaign on the other side of the Atlantic?

There’s a clue in this press release from January announcing Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert’s $40,000 lobbying jaunts to the US and Europe: “The European Union is not currently a major market for Alberta’s oil sands products, but any legislation or tariffs adopted by the union’s government can serve as a model for individual nations around the world. We want to continue to share our story with the legislators so they have the facts about our clean energy strategies”

(I’ll let the “clean energy strategies” rubbish slide for now.)

It’s not about protecting existing markets. At the moment the vast majority of exported tar sands oil goes to the US. For the most part, it’s not even about securing a regulatory environment in Europe that protects future potential markets (although that is no doubt a contributing factor). I’ll tell you why the Canadian and Albertan governments are so worried that they’ve been applying pressure on European legislators to a degree at least one EU parliamentarian has declared “unacceptable”.

About the Author

Matthew Carroll is an environm­entalist, scientist, and campaign strategist, currently living in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. He has a masters degree in atmospheric chemistry from University of Leeds and University of Toronto, and over eight years’ experience educating, facilitating, and engaging youth in local, regional, national and international decision making. Matthew firmly believes that climate change is the defining social justice issue of this generation, and that young people have a pivotal leadership role to play in building a just transition to a zero-carbon future.

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